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was gonna be wonderful and he couldn’t fail.’
Defries took little interest in the details of what
was going on backstage, where the atmosphere
was turning nasty and Stuey George in particular
was becoming ‘far too heavy’, says Mayhew. ‘If there
were fans hanging around he’d lay into them. We’re
saying, “Don’t be so heavy” – he’d be shouting at the
kids, effing and blinding, and it was very scary for
them, this heavy, coloured guy with a limp, who
looked like he’d been through it, heading for them.’
Tony Frost, the second of David’s three bodyguards,
became another Scientology convert, adding to the
haze of hype and confusion emanating from the
MainMan circus.
Much of the edge, intensity and euphoria of that
LA week was audible in the Santa Monica shows on
20 and 21 October. They were a triumph, the
seventeen-song set offering delight after delight,
running across what would be five Bowie albums.
Defries had sold the tour as the biggest by an
English act since The Beatles; that night’s radio
recording, for KMET, suggests that if anything he’d
undersold his charges, for this set was more
adventurous, more visceral and more proficient than
anything the Fabs had delivered on stage in
America. For years, the recording of the opening
night’s performance would be a definitive rock ‘n’ roll
bootleg; in the mid-seventies, many English punk
bands would admire its high-octane assault, and
copy Ronson’s modified chord sequence on
‘Waiting for the Man’.
In the couple of days before David departed for